An al-Qaeda linked terrorist plot has been foiled after police officers caught
a man filming targets on his mobile phone in the first case of its kind.

Police have released the footage they found, recorded around the third anniversary of July 7 last year, that showed four key London stations – Liverpool Street, Oxford Circus, Camden Town and Mornington Crescent.

Officers believe he was filming possible sites for an attack to take to senior terrorist controllers in North Africa.

In an hour and a half of footage, the man tried to hide the red light that showed he was filming as he focused on entrances, exits and CCTV cameras, at one point commenting in a lift: “There are cameras there. There are cameras everywhere.”

The camera was occasionally tipped on its side, in a similar way to footage taken by the al-Qaeda terrorist Dhiren Barot, which officers believe was a signal to indicate he was filming a potential target.

When they raided the man’s flat in Brent, North West London, they discovered radical literature connected to al-Qaeda and a list of shopping centres.

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Inquiries subsequently discovered the man had previously lived in Wood Green, North London with Mustapha Labsi, an Algerian deported to France in connection with an alleged plot to attack the G7 summit in Lille in 1994.

He had also been in contact with another suspected terrorist cell and had been a regular visitor to Finsbury Park mosque when the radical preacher Abu Hamza was based there, sources told The Daily Telegraph.

Police believe the man, an illegal immigrant from Algeria in his early forties, had raised hundreds of thousands of pounds to fund terrorism through credit card fraud.

The man, his brother and a third man, slept in a tiny one bedroom flat with no obvious trappings of wealth, suggesting the money had been sent abroad.

The men were due to leave the country on separate flights three days after their arrest and counter terrorism officers from the City of London Police believe they were returning to Algeria to show the footage they had gathered to their terrorist controllers.

Det Chief Insp Richard Jack from City of London Police, who led the investigation, said: “We had no intelligence about any of these men. They were using false identities and we had no idea they really were but we believe this was hostile reconnaissance for a planned attack."

Det Supt Chris Greany, head of counter-terrorism at the force added: “The threat is still there. In this case we simply caught them in the act but if they were out there, there must be others.”

The force has been upset by criticism that they have been unfairly stopping people legitimately taking photographs of tourist attractions.

In the latest case, a police constable and a community support officer spotted the man filming on his mobile phone at Liverpool Street station in central London on July 11 last year and stopped and searched him under anti-terrorism laws.

When stopped the man claimed he did not speak English and said to the officers “Tourist, tourist.”

But they discovered that he had entered the country as an illegal immigrant using a forged Italian passport in 2000 on the Eurostar. His brother had arrived three years earlier on a forged French passport.

Both men had managed to secure National Insurance numbers and worked briefly in restaurants before turning to a life of crime.

They had been using an Audi A4 diesel turbo worth £27,000 to conduct part of their surveillance mission and police believe they planned to export the car back to Algeria to raise more money.

They were also buying mobile phones and racks of designer clothing.

In a Filofax, officers found a list of shopping centres that included Bluewater in Kent, the target of a previous terrorist attack in 2004, discount outlets in Ashford, Kent and Bicester, Oxfordshire and the McArthur Glen outlets in Swindon, Wiltshire and Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan.

They had also conducted reconnaissance, captured on the mobile phone, at the Galleria Shopping Centre in Hatfield, Hertfordshire on July 10 and filmed the journey from Warren Street to Oxford Circus by bus, along with the shopping centre at Broadgate Circle in the City of London.

The first man pleaded guilty to identity fraud and sentenced to two years and his brother pleaded guilty to identity fraud and conspiracy to defraud and was sentenced to two and a half years. Both have now been released and deported to Algeria.